Thursday, October 16. 2008

Irish Spatial Data Exchange Up and Running

The Irish Spatial Data Exchange is the country's step toward a spatial data infrastructure. Per Silicon Republic:

The ISDE is a multi-agency initiative by the Marine Institute; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Geological Survey of Ireland; Exploration and Mining Division and Petroleum Affairs Division of the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources; the National Parks and Wildlife Division of the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government; and the Coastal Marine Research Centre of University College Cork.

A interesting notes on the implementation:

- The exchange architecture is distributed with a light central mediation service. The exchange is based around OGC and ISO standards, which allows it to be independent of any catalogue implementation technologies.

So it uses standards, not a specific implementation for a catalog.

Two browser versions exist, namely that developed by ESRI-Ireland and an open-source browser developed by CMRC at UCC.

I wonder why two were needed. I'm not sure if I used either or if they are even available at this point. The help made no reference to them. Here's the architecture pic.
Metadata searching is available via text search or accompanied by spatial extent and date. So far as I can tell there is no "map viewer" to examine found live data at this time.